Europe faces a new age of gunboat digital diplomacy

In an era dominated by tech giants worth trillions of dollars, no European firm started from scratch in the past 50 years is today valued at more than a mere hundred billion (Spotify, a music-streaming service based in Sweden, hovers around the mark). The absence of entrepreneurial vigour is a recurring source of frustration for European politicians in search of economic pep and tax receipts. With no local corporate tech titans to berate into creating jobs, German chancellors, French presidents and their like have had to grit their teeth as they beseeched one visiting American bro after another to consider setting up a research facility, artificial-intelligence (AI) hub or gigafactory in their country. As both sides posed for the obligatory selfie, it could be hard to tell who had the upper hand: the elected leaders, or the globally known plutocrats with net worths bigger than most EU countries’ budgets? At least, the politicians could tell themselves, even the mightiest Amazons or Facebooks of the world would have to follow European laws as a condition of doing business there.